The SmartBlock stand-ins are bundled with Firefox: no actual third-party content from the trackers are loaded at all, so there is no chance for them to track you this way.
Those third party scripts may not be able to track, but I wonder if the act of loading the stand-in scripts quickly (?) from within Firefox would lead to other issues.
We also want to acknowledge the NoScript and uBlock Origin teams for helping to pioneer this approach.
Not to belittle the effort by others and other projects, but these two extensions, along with some others (like Privacy Badger), have helped users immensely in protecting themselves.
Hi, lead SmartBlock dev here. My regular job at Mozilla involves diagnosing web sites for web compatibility issues, so I definitely share your concerns -- I routinely see sites relying on scripts loading in a specific order, but not coding themselves in a way that ensures that they actually do.
I haven't received any reports so far during the six-month-or-so nightly cycle where SmartBlock was only on nightly builds, so I'm optimistic. In the worst case we might be able to just add in an artificial delay to fix that, but of course I'd rather waste user's time like that unless that's 100% necessary.
And ultimately, problems are at least as likely (in my experience) to manifest with scripts loading too slowly, or not loading at all due to random networking hiccups.. many sites just aren't very tolerant at all of script loading failures.
Comments
Those third party scripts may not be able to track, but I wonder if the act of loading the stand-in scripts quickly (?) from within Firefox would lead to other issues.
Not to belittle the effort by others and other projects, but these two extensions, along with some others (like Privacy Badger), have helped users immensely in protecting themselves.
Hi, lead SmartBlock dev here. My regular job at Mozilla involves diagnosing web sites for web compatibility issues, so I definitely share your concerns -- I routinely see sites relying on scripts loading in a specific order, but not coding themselves in a way that ensures that they actually do.
I haven't received any reports so far during the six-month-or-so nightly cycle where SmartBlock was only on nightly builds, so I'm optimistic. In the worst case we might be able to just add in an artificial delay to fix that, but of course I'd rather waste user's time like that unless that's 100% necessary.
And ultimately, problems are at least as likely (in my experience) to manifest with scripts loading too slowly, or not loading at all due to random networking hiccups.. many sites just aren't very tolerant at all of script loading failures.
That's essentially the same as if they are loaded from the browser cache. What sort of issues are you concerned about?
Mozilla does everything in the open, if you care to look at their bugtracker you will probably find all the conversation there, pros and cons, etc.